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Monthly Archives: December 2015

We had two presentations to finish out our Fall User group meetings two weeks ago. The first was from two representatives from Pearson about a new tool called REVEL. And to finish things up our very own Tony Soares gave us the rundown of how Echo 360 analytics work. Lets get right into it.

According to Pearson, REVEL delivers immersive learning experiences designed for the way today’s students read, think, and learn. Click on the picture below for a short video to give you some more insight into what REVEL is.

REVEL was created after lots of feedback and interactions from faculty and students alike. The demo we saw showed how interactive and engaging this new product can be. Through highlighting, notes and more the Professor-Student relationship can be taken to a whole new level.

REVEL has many features for both students and faculty. A few of them include:

Interactives and videos

Quizzing

A fully mobile learning experience

Familiar learning and study tools

Assignability and tracking

Assignment Calendar

Performance Dashboard

One of the key features is that the tool works seamlessly on both your laptop and tablet so that you can use it wherever and whenever. In many cases it may also save you some money because it is more affordable than a printed text. You can access some “How Do I?” Videos by clicking here to give you a better overview of what you can do with Pearson’s REVEL.

One of our resident Echo 360 guru’s, Tony Soares, gave us a presentation on Echo 360 and how the analytics work. On the surface Echo 360 is a great lecture capture recording tool that has many benefits to students and professors. When you dig a little bit deeper, you can truly gauge its impact.

Your course Echo Center is where it all begins. It gives you statistics on unique viewers and cumulative views by each Echo recording. It breaks it down by the actual recording and allows for open discussion as well as the option of creating bookmarks at important points in the recording.

Need to see how many students viewed a particular lecture? Echo analytics can do that. Want to see a heat map of the sections of your recording that the students watched the most? Echo analytics can do that as well. Need to build a report and see exactly which students viewed which recording? Echo analytics can do that. This tool is truly beneficial in helping make students more accountable.

Overall Echo 360 is a great tool that all faculty should at least try to implement in their course. Not only will it improve student accountability, but it will enrich their learning experience by giving them another avenue to grasp the material being presented.

That does it for the Fall user group meetings. Spring dates will be posted soon. Have a happy and safe holiday season!!

Our meeting on November 18th was very productive and full of exciting and new technology. As a break from our usual VC set-up between Miller 16 (PLV) and E319 (NYC), we had this meeting in Miller 21 (PLV) so the features of the brand new active learning classroom could be shown off. Beth Gordon of ITS led the discussion and over the 2016 January Intersession, NYC will be getting similar upgrades to these active learning classrooms. After this discussion, Rich Miller from Dyson IT gave a presentation on Adobe eSign (formerly Echo Sign) which has been piloted for the past year now and is really starting to take off, as it safely, securely, and seamlessly brings the tedious process of collecting signatures on a document into the 21st century.

The new active learning classrooms in Pleasantville give faculty the resources they need to engage their students in a more unconventional learning environment. This new classroom is not structured like a traditional classroom. For starters, just about everything in the room can move allowing for lessons to flow dynamically. All of the student chairs with attached desks swivel and move easily on the floor, so the room can be configured in the way best suited to each discussion. There is a lot of connected media in this classroom (including 3 large TV screens) allowing faculty to present digital content in addition to connecting with student devices. This new classroom is really state of the art and it is exciting as faculty begin to discover the new possibilities these rooms offer. For further information on the ALC classrooms, please contact your campus Ed Media department by clicking here.

Adobe eSign is a fantastic tool as it provides a fast cloud-based document signature solution to faculty and staff at Pace. Anyone with an e-mail account can receive and sign documents and they only need to type their name or sign with their finger (which works best on mobile devices as the program is mobile friendly). The process of sending out documents for signature is very easy too, akin to sending a simple e-mail. Any form can be used in eSign and Rich has put together a repository of all sorts of forms as a shortcut for users. This tool allows multiple signature to be collected in a timely fashion and give users controls so they can track all of their documents out for signature. An eSign account is only needed to initiate documents for signature, so if you are interested in this, please contact Rich Miller: rmiller@pace.edu.

If you have any comments or questions on this meeting or would like to suggest topics for future meetings, please comment below.